Maybe they drew your people here. They didn’t carry them.
What do you know about it? You never know the answer to anything interesting. All of a sudden you know things?
The heart is waking up my memories.
And why would it do that? Nona kept her eyes on the doorways ahead, trying not to let Keot distract her.
Because it’s where I was born.
Nona made no reply, returning her attention to the corridor. Keot’s certainty unsettled her. There was a draw to the shipheart’s presence. Perhaps the fascination that the flame holds for the moth. She felt its pull in the marrow of her bones.
They advanced around another corner. From her time with Hessa Nona knew that the shipheart had to be within fifty feet or so now. Keot blazed across her chest and down over her abdomen. He seemed to be feeding on the shipheart’s power in ways that Nona couldn’t understand. His natural anger and lust to kill began to bleed out into her. Earlier she had felt his grip on her weakening and thought that one day she might be able to drive him out. Kettle must know of the devil now, having worn Nona’s flesh and bones back in the Tetragode. What she might do about it was a problem for later. If there was a later.
A cold shiver ran through Nona, toes to head, pulling her away from thoughts of Keot. Something had changed. Suddenly the halls of Sherzal’s palace seemed echoingly empty, not conveniently empty but as if Nona had turned around in a crowded market square to find in that instant the place stood deserted with just the wind to stir the space where people should have been.
“She’s watching us,” Nona said, knowing it to be true though not knowing how. She tried to reach for her own anger rather than Keot’s and found only fear. Over her shoulder she saw that Clera was backing away.
The cracking of stone was their only warning. Shards of masonry broke from the wall at the margins of the area from which Yisht stepped. She emerged behind them, the stonework releasing her with reluctance, as if she were pulling free of thick mud.
Clera spun around with a squeal of fear. Nona and Kettle disentangled, turning as they did, the nun hopping back on her good leg.
Yisht broke clear about the same time that Clera recovered enough of her wits to hurl the throwing stars she’d been given. Kettle and Nona threw theirs a fraction later, six in the first volley, more following.
Clera had never been particularly accurate with throwing stars. Her right-hand throw at least centred on Yisht’s body mass, the left angled wide of target. Lacking hunska speed, though, the warrior should have been hit at least five times. She stepped through the hail of sharp metal unharmed. Her ability to read the immediate future allowed her to begin plotting a path that would evade the stars even before her opponents had decided to throw them.
Yisht had changed. She wore the same black garb, knives across her chest in a black leather harness, her tular—the flat-bladed sword favoured by the ice-tribes—at her hip. She seemed to wear the same body too, though it moved in unnatural ways as if occupied by some larger presence. The flat bones of her face cut the same angles, but her black eyes sat in a crimson sea rather than the whites she once had, and her skin had become a moving patchwork of scarlet, deep purple, black, grey, and bone-white.
Nona knew exactly what she was looking at. “She’s full of devils.”
Where Nona had one, and Raymel had returned from death’s border with four, Yisht had so many that they competed for space, surging across any exposed skin. Nona could almost hear them screaming for her blood.
Clera, who had been closest to the point where Yisht emerged, now passed Kettle and Nona, moving fast. “I know another way out!”
“We want the vault, not a way out!” Kettle called after her. To Nona’s ear the nun didn’t sound as convinced as she had before.
Nona gathered her courage, reaching for another weapon. Kettle set her back against the wall, calling on the shadows. The sword Nona drew from her rope belt felt unfamiliar in her hand, a Noi-Guin blade, a little shorter, straighter, and heavier than the swords Sister Tallow trained the novices with.
Yisht had never been one for smiling, but she smiled now, her teeth bloody. She pulled her tular from the grip of its scabbard, along the side slit as tulars are nearly twice as broad at the end as at the hilt. By rights she should be the one afraid, facing a sword-trained novice whose speed could leave her swinging at air.
Nona held her ground, making test cuts to learn the feel of her weapon. Behind her the darkness began to thicken and clot as Kettle focused her strength to give the night claws.
Yisht came in at a steady pace, sword before her, arm extended.
“Clera!” Nona called after her departing friend. Yisht had defeated them both once before, along with a classful of other novices, but they had been children then.
“Friends are a weakness,” Yisht said. “I taught Zole this lesson.”
She attacked as she spoke and at the first parry Nona’s sword was all but taken from her hands. The ice-triber’s strength was incredible. Nona struck back, launching a blinding sequence of blows, moving as fast as she ever had. Yisht met each one with a perfectly placed parry. Nona tried to carry her slices over the interposed edge but Yisht somehow twisted her blade to stop such moves, almost disarming her.
A vicious swing at stomach level had Nona leaping backward, pulling in her hips and belly as the end of Yisht’s tular sliced within a finger’s breadth.
How can you be losing? Keot howled.
She knows everything I’m going to do! Nona turned a thrust from her chest. She can see the future.
She can’t see the future, just what you and your friends are going to do next, because you’re such primitive things. She can’t predict a dice roll or see what I will do.
Well, do something then! Nona deflected another attack, feeling the wind ripple behind Yisht’s tular as it passed her face. Don’t just talk! But she knew that talk was all Keot had.
It’s easy, Keot said. Do something she can’t stop even if she knows it’s coming!
Nona fell back another step then leapt into the moment. She swung at Yisht’s head from the woman’s right and their two blades met in a jarring crash. Nona pulled her sword away, starting to rotate on a heel. She accelerated into the motion, turning her back on Yisht, relying only on the lack of time to keep the woman from cutting her down. Yisht’s sword was high up on her right side, still shaking with the echoes of that last parry. If Nona could spin around and cut in low from the left there was no way Yisht could physically move her blade fast enough to interpose it.
Yisht’s boot heel smacked into Nona’s backside as her spin turned her through the half-circle. She must have started the kick before Nona started turning, and it sent her sprawling away onto her front. Nona barely managed to avoid being skewered by the follow-up, pinned to the floor. She rolled away beneath Yisht’s descending blade with an inch to spare.
Kettle’s shadows launched themselves at Yisht over Nona’s prone body. Nona saw the ice-triber fall back before the mass of rending darkness, just as she had once fallen back before Nona’s own avenging shadow.